CDC to Sequester Beltway

From the relative safety of his office in Druid Hills, Georgia, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, announced today that he and his agency are recommending in the strongest terms possible that the entire area known as “Inside the Beltway” be locked down in a Class 5 Premises Quarantine Containment action.

Said Dr. Frieden, “Something very very bad is going on in there.

“Our scientists have come to the chilling end of a decade-long ride that has taken them implacably from the mildly disturbing to the truly terrifying end of the spectrum of theories that might explain why the Beltway Elite have become bent on national suicide.

“Our biologists have ruled out the relatively benign hypothesis that the proliferation of lobbyists and consultants and media personalities and hosts of other kinds of players Inside the Beltway has led to some sort of almost natural lemming-like consensus on the wisdom of leading the nation over a cliff.

“Our social scientists have come up empty in their search for a Jim Jones figure behind the scenes stirring up the Kool-Aid of perpetual war and neoliberalism and austerity and plutocracy.

“Our neuroscientists have reported to me that the state-of-the-art mood enhancer the Beltway Elite are all taking to mitigate the suicidal ideation that is a side effect of the designer mood enhancer they’re all taking has forced their team to abandon the theory that the communal scorched-earth death wish being so aggressively acted upon in Washington is drug-induced.

“The good news, as bleak as it is, is that the CDC has pinned the source of the problem down in the realm of abnormal social psychology.”

Explained Dr. Barbara Fischer, head of the CDC’s team of social psychiatrists, “What we’re looking at is the product of years and years of incestuous relations between federal office holders and lobbyists and media commentators and socialites and academic and religious and corporate titans.

“What the Beltway has bred is one big inbred many-headed walking and talking cauldron of psychological pathology.

“The Freudians on our team at first were convinced that the Beltway Elite are engaged in an over-the-top Oedipal killing off of the Fatherland out of some unbelievably warped and inappropriate love of the Motherland, whom, metaphorically, they’ve become single-mindedly intent on screwing.

“What we’ve come to find out, though, is that the cream of the nation’s crop have fallen victim to a collective masochistic personality disorder marked by a seething subconscious self-hatred that’s got us all locked into the most vicious of cycles: their self-hatred over all the self-destructive behaviors they engage in out of self-hatred over all their self-destructive behaviors leads to more self-destructive behaviors and of course more seething self-hatred.

“Think about it. How would you feel about yourself if you’d been responsible for all the mind-bogglingly senseless carnage in Iraq? What wouldn’t you want to do to yourself if year in and year out tens of thousands of your fellow Americans were needlessly dying and countless others were needlessly suffering physical and emotional and economic misery just because the conventional Beltway wisdom you pulled out of your butt said America can’t insure all her people?

“What wouldn’t you want to do to everybody Outside the Beltway for letting you just keep doing all this horrible nonstop damage to your soul?”

Said CDC director Frieden, “We’re in the middle of a psychological meltdown of Chernobyl proportions. As soon as humanly possible we need to put a bubble over the bubble already encasing the Beltway.

“This should save us for a while, but I’m afraid our only real hope long-term at this point is that the global warming the Beltway Elite hasn’t been letting anybody address will somehow make the Bermuda Triangle migrate north and west until it swallows this whole problem up for good.”